A Big THANK YOU! Also a Royal Icing Tutorial

So, I've been meaning to share with you all how to make the kind of royal icing I use for cookies like these, and these, and especially these, but there's something very important I have to say first:

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

Thank you to everyone who clicked a link and came to say hi, thank you to everyone who liked the webcomic cookies or the flower pot cupcakes and decided to stay around, thank you to everyone who saw something they liked here and shared it with their friends and internet buddies.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I've been absolutely overwhelmed with the pageviews and feedback, and being featured in places like Comics Alliance and Webcomic Overlook and even the front page of a popular Cheezburger Network site! And how could I forget all the kind webcomic creators, artists and writers who shared my TCAF cookies post? (By the way, if you haven't looked at that post yet, and you have any love for comics at all, go look at it and click every dang link. You're welcome.) Of course, I must mention my super-supportive co-workers, friends, and family members who demand I bake on a regular basis. Y'all know who you are, and y'all know I love you!

I'm sure I'm missing someone, and whoever it is: thank you!

So, yeah, the English language is sorely lacking in ways to express gratitude, is what I'm finding here.

Thanks!

Now, to get back to sharing recipes and techniques: Royal icing!

A lot of people think that making royal icing is really hard. I was once one of those people. It's true that it can be a cruel mistress - too hot or humid out, and it may refuse to come together at all, a drop of fat in your bowl or stuck to your beater, and it may never stiffen.

So, uh, it's really not so much that it's hard to make, it's just that the correct conditions can be tough to achieve.

It's best not to make this on a hot, humid day. Make sure your beaters, bowl, spatula, and anything that will touch the icing is 100% clean. It's best to use glass or metal bowls and instruments since plastic tends to bond to fat and hold onto it more.

I, uh... I still used plastic. Gotta work with what you've got, you know.

So on the left, we have meringue powder and cream of tartar, and on the right, slightly warm water. I very precisely measured and weighed these ingredients, because another thing about royal icing is you need to follow the recipe pretty dang exactly.

Step one is simply to mix the meringue powder, cream of tartar and water together with a whisk, until foamy.

Like so. Then start adding your powdered sugar, a bit at a time until it's all in there, mixing all the while with your hand mixer (or if you're one of the lucky ones, your stand mixer) until the sugar is all incorporated.

Scrape the sides down with a spatula to make sure you don't miss any of the sugar. Once it's all combined, keep mixing for 5-7 minutes, until the icing becomes rather firm and loses some of its shine.

You'll know you're done if you pull your beaters out of the icing and they do something like this:

Those are stiff peaks, and the icing is hardly shiny at all. You're ready to add your favourite colours and start decorating your cookies! Have fun!

See? That wasn't really so hard. Though if, like me, you had to use a hand-mixer, you may need to massage your wrists a little. That's a marathon of mixing, isn't it?

If you want to try it out and decorate your own unique cookies, here's the recipe:

Royal Icing
Recipe & instructions adapted from McCall's School of Cake Decorating

40 g meringue powder
5 g cream of tartar
190 g warm water
1000 g icing sugar

Note: Yes, it's all in weights. You do need a decent kitchen scale for this, sorry. Due to the nature of the powdery ingredients, volumetric measurements just aren't good enough here.

Mix first 3 ingredients with hand whisk until foamy. Using stand or hand mixer on low, beat in sugar about a cup at a time until well-combined. Continue to beat for another 5-7 minutes on low or until icing is firm.

It's a good idea to cover your bowl with a damp cloth or towel and let it sit for 10-15 minutes before using, then give it a gentle stir with a spatula to remove any large air bubbles. Then you're good to go!

Be sure to keep any royal icing covered with a damp cloth while not using to keep it from going rock-hard when you don't want it to. To learn more about how I outline and fill cookies, refer to the Send-Off Cookies Post.

***

Thanks (yet again) for reading. I'll be sure to fill y'all in on what I baked up for my own Mom on Mother's Day later this week, so keep an eye out for that.

Until next time!

TCAF: Of Comics and Cookies

Hello, friends. Have I ever mentioned what an absolute comics fanatic I am?

I am an absolute comics fanatic. And I don't just mean I read X-Men comics from the 90's (though I certainly do) but I mean I am mad about all kinds of comics, especially independent stuff that really breaks away from the traditional 'muscle-bound dudes in capes and skimpily-clad sexpots fight evil' stuff.

So, man, am I ever lucky to live in Toronto, where every year I can visit the Toronto Comics Art Festival and meet & chat up my favourite artists! This year, though, I was a little broke. Work had been scarce lately, so I couldn't go and purchase my usual metric tonne of new comic books and graphic novels.

Sigh.

I still wanted to go, though. But I needed to do something for my favourite artists. I would feel so bad just saying hello and not buying anything, and not doing anything for them. So at the last minute, the night before the event, I started decorating cookies.

Unfortunately, since I was so short on time, I didn't get to do cookies for all my favourite artists, but I promised I'd make it up to those I'd missed at the next festival/convention.

Anyone recognise what any of these are? Well, if not, don't feel bad. I didn't expect there to be huge overlap between my lovely, baking-lovin' readers and us comic fans. I'll break it down for you though, because if you have any love for comics at all, my friends, these are among the best!

First, the cookie cutter that inspired it all:

I've had a big 100-piece cookie cutter set for years, but only noticed the other day that this cutter bears an uncanny resemblance to a character in one of my favourite online comics: Dinosaur Comics! Written by the extremely witty Ryan North, this comic is basically the same 6 panels of clip art dinosaurs having ridiculous, philosophical, inspiring, and/or completely inane conversations. It is hilarious, and I cannot stop reading it.

Thus it began. If I was going to make a cookie for Ryan North, why, I needed to make one for everybody!

I had to get creative with the shapes for some of these. The T-Rex, cat and basic shapes I had, but the shamrock and heart-with-ribbon took some custom cutting.

It took 2 tries to get the icing on T-Rex right. This still isn't an exact likeness, but the previous one, well, just be thankful I didn't bother with a picture. I don't wish to be responsible for your nightmares.

Now, just what has caught T-Rex's eye?

Wuh-oh, Cricket! Might wanna get out of range there. The cute li'l black & white kitty cookie is based on Cricket, Yuko's cat, from Johnny Wander. This comic is an autobiographic comic by and about Ananth and Yuko, and sometimes they show previews and snippets from some of their other work. It is funny, cute, and always charming. And gosh, I love that cat!

It is totally worth checking out.

For this cheerful little cactus fellow, I needed reference since I was icing him onto a plain oval cookie. It's hard to see, but I used a toothpick to scratch out an outline to ice over. 

And voila! This my friends, is McPedro, the sassy talking cactus with a Scottish/Irish/Scirish accent from the brilliant comic Girls with Slingshots. The comic is about 2 girls, cynical Hazel and optimist sweetheart Jamie, and their groups of friends and adventures. It's meant for college-age or older readers, mostly, though, and is sometimes a bit adult, so if you're offended by frank talk about sex lives, ehhhh, maybe go read this next one instead.

This little pot is called, well, Pot. He's the living, silent, loyal cooking device of the intrepid explorer chef Rutabaga! This is a relatively new comic by writer and artist Eric Colossal, but I am head-over-heels-in-love with it already. It's a cute, cartoony comic about a chef who tires of the usual fare and goes exploring for new and exciting ingredients in a fun fantasy setting. A probable PG rating on this one guys.

If you love fantasy, cooking, and humor, Rutabaga is an absolute must.

This is... eh... uh... pardon me while I dissolve into nervous giggling for a moment.

Okay, I think I have it out of my system now. I'm not going to link directly to this one, because I really want to keep this blog PG. Really I do. So, uh, if you don't mind a rating a bit higher than PG, highlight the space below.

This is from the amazing comic Chester 5000 XYV by the fabulous Jess Fink. This comic centers around a lonely young Victorian-era bride whose husband is simply too busy for her, er, needs. So he builds her a robot to keep her company. And boy, does he EVER! 

(Keep scrolling, PG fans!)

So there are many naughty, naughty, explicit scenes of robot and non-robot love. Did I mention the entire story is told without dialogue? And done extremely well? And that the characters are relate-able, lovable, and that the story is compelling? And that the sexy scenes are really, really sexy?

Google it, my adult-entertainment-friendly friends. Chester 5000 XYV. Okay, back to cookies and behaving now.

And for those of you who did not highlight and are happy to skip whatever naughty info is hidden there, this is simply a fancy keyhole. Moving on.

This is the symbol of the Sincerists, a fictional group of folks in the alternate universe crafted in Templar, Arizona. This group of folks tells the truth, all the time, no matter how blunt or brutal. I both love and hate them.

This comic is for adults, too, lots of swears and adult situations. It often deals with unhealthy relationships and substance abuse. And it. Is. INCREDIBLE.

The story centres initially around a young man named Benjamin who is trying to start a new life as a writer, in a new town. Then we meet his neighbours, and learn about the crazy, and yet entirely believable, world that Spike Trotman has written, illustrated, and brought to sparkling life. I don't want to give too much away, but it is a wild, emotional, hilarious, touching, disturbing ride. You've got to check it out. You will be amazed.

The only downside was, well, I messed up. Spike didn't come to TCAF this year, and I missed the memo. Oh well, guess I'll just have to eat this delicious cookie myself. Life is too cruel.

Well, gee, these cookies look kind of boring, huh? Just random words on blank white cards. But maybe they'd be more interesting if I told you that they were actually 100% accurate death predictions? Then what? What would the world be like if you could actually know, ahead of time, how you would die? This morbid yet fascinating scenario is explored in a soon-to-be-2-volume collection of short stories called Machine of Death.

I can't even explain it to you fully. If the above premise sounds at all interesting, just click the link. I will add, though, that the idea sprung from the head of the aforementioned Ryan North (in a Dinosaur Comic strip, actually!) and that David Malki ! (the punctuation is part of his name. I don't know, either) was a co-editor for the books. I shared the cookies between the two of them, and saved one to go with the following:

Sorry for the poor quality, I missed getting good pics of some of these because I was just so exhausted!

Hope no-one's squeamish. That's a shamrock spattered with blood. What the heck, right? Well, if you're an Irish ninja on a cold, cold, day, and you're all out of shurikens, sometimes a frozen shamrock just has to do! What the heck am I talking about? Dr. McNinja! It... it is exactly what it sounds like. A crazy, ridiculous, action-humor comic about an Irish-American ninja, who is also a doctor. His is a conflicted life.

And Chris Hastings, the awesome author and pencil-wielding-dude behind it, was also one of the many artists involved with the Machine of Death books.

Despite the fact that I was trying to save money, I did bring home some sweet, sweet swag. A preview of the next Machine of Death book, a beautiful and sassy print by Jess Fink, fun sentence-building magnets based on Dinosaur Comics, a lovely quickie sketch of my favorite Girls with Slingshots character, and of course, volume one of Rutabaga! Which I have already devoured, and I hunger for more.

The magnets with the dress-up bear are from a comic called Sam and Fuzzy, which started as a comic about a cabbie and his talking bear friend, and evolved into something involving TV stardom, metal bands and their roadies, and a ninja mafia. That's the best I can do to summarize a comic that's been running 10 years! Also, I should mention it is fantastic. And that I suck and did not make a cookie for the creator, Sam Logan. But I will, next time he's in town, and it will be fantastic.

The little set of buttons is from a hilarious comic called Bear Nuts by Alison Acton. The best way I can describe it is... picture if the Carebears weren't about love, caring and sharing, and rather, were about self-medicating, or being lecherous, or crazed, or drunk all the time. Sound fun? I thought so. It is of course, not a comic for kids. I am SO looking forward to making the cookies for it though. Click over for a minute if only to look at how bright, cartoony, and wonderful her art is! It is going to make great cookies!

Okay, if you made it through all that, you are such a trooper! And you deserve to see something actually baking related.

I finally, finally got my hands on this book!

I have wanted this book since it was first mentioned on the Cupcakes Take the Cake blog oh so many years ago (at least, I'm pretty sure that's where I first heard of it, it's been a while!) and at last it is mine!

I "discovered" a little shop called The Cookbook Store, right across the street from the Toronto Reference Library, where TCAF is held. No-one ever told me there was such a thing as a store that sold only cookbooks! I would have spent hours perusing if my poor brother wasn't waiting impatiently outside the shop for me. 

If you're not in the Toronto area, you can of course find Hello, Cupcake! online. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some comics and a cupcake book to read. I cannot wait to make more comic cookies, and goodness knows what kind of cupcakes I'll make next!

Coming soon for sure, though, is a how-to on royal icing, and possibly a post about lava cakes? Can't decide, just now... must read about cupcakes!

Until next time!

Midnight Muffin Mania

One night, just around midnight, I was very suddenly craving muffins. Delicious, moist, chocolaty muffins with butter melting over their still-hot-from-the-oven fluffy interiors.

But I had no muffin mix. Now, I am generally a proponent of making things from scratch, because it's generally more fun and often has better results. One of a few exceptions to this 'rule' is muffins. I had never actually made muffins from scratch, unless you count my banana ones, which I don't, since they're actually only my banana bread baked in muffin-size which doesn't really count.

So anyway. I was struck by the urge to make muffins.

So I pulled out Great Grandma's ancient, crumbling, may-have-been-Betty-Crocker-but-who-knows-we-lost-the-cover cookbook and looked up muffins. There were two options: Popular Muffins or Sweet Muffins, and a list of add-ins and varieties. Fun!

I thought Popular Muffins sounded good, and dove right into making them.

Mixed up my wet ingredients - egg, oil, milk.

Piled on the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and chocolate chips.

Oh-so-carefully folded everything together until it just, just was combined because if there's one thing that's been drilled into my head about muffins, it's that you'd better not ever over-mix them.

I dished the dough out into a greased 12-muffin pan, and baked according to the directions.

They puffed up tall and pretty and delicious-looking! They tasted... like biscuits. The suggestions in the book made it sound like these would make great berry or fruit muffins, but honestly? They'd work much better with flavors like cheese, or corn.

They aren't inherently bad, really, but they were definitely not what I was looking for. I mean, they were edible. Hubby and I certainly ate them, no use letting decent food go to waste, but they weren't what I wanted a muffin to be.

I guess what constitutes 'popular muffins' has changed somewhat in the last 40-50 years. Huh.

So when I got another muffin craving a few weeks later, this time with guests over for breakfast, I knew the sweet muffins were the way to go.

They started off much the same, with slightly different amounts of oil and milk added to the egg.

And slightly different amounts of flour, baking powder, sugar and salt tossed on top. I still kept the same amount of chocolate chips though.

Folded it all together extra carefully...

Greased my pans and filled them up, and followed the baking directions exactly. Certainly, this time I would have delicious, perfect muffins to serve my guests.

As the timer went off, I gleefully donned my oven mitts, pranced to the oven and threw open the door to reveal -

... Dry, slightly burnt, crunchy, vaguely muffin-like bulgy disc things.

Let me reiterate that I followed the baking directions exactly. Heck, I even timed them for the lowest suggested time just to be on the safe side. Burnt crunchy muffin discs.


I think on that particular day back in the Betty Crocker test kitchens, someone forgot to record how this muffin variation should actually be baked. Just to be clear, the directions they printed were not the correct way.

These poor little muffins tried so hard to be tasty, and you know, with a little butter on there, they almost made it. I only hurt my teeth a bit on the outside. Luckily, I did have a pack of bran muffin mix on hand, so breakfast for my guests was not a complete loss. Phew.

At this point, I was well and truly ready to just swear off muffins from scratch. Far too much trouble, really. Too finicky an item, surely I'd never have it right.

But then the other night, it happened. My tummy had the grumblies, and as I glanced around my humble abode, there were scarce snacks to be found. I knew I had all the makings for muffins, but dare I be so bold as to attempt them again, after such crushing defeat?

Suddenly, I was filled with a steely resolve. This would be the night. This would be the one. The batch of muffins that worked. There were gonna be some changes around here.

I kept the mix the same but changed everything about the directions. 12 muffins? Pfft. This is making 8, tops. Forget carefully-measured dollops filling the cups 2/3 of the way. We're piling all the batter in there we've got.

Next, the original directions called for baking 20-25 minutes at 400 degrees. I should have known from the start that this was insane but, filled with muffin-baking enthusiasm as I was, I had failed to see the signs. Now, older, wiser and more jaded, I knew better.

Just about 19-20 minutes, and only at 350.

I peeked into the oven with some slight trepidation. Despite my initial confidence and bravado (as I baked muffins at 2 AM in my pyjamas) I feared that this, too, would fail, and I would be forever condemned to muffin-less misery.

But what's this? Beautifully rounded little muffins with perfectly golden sides and bottoms? Could it be?

And... the insides are moist and fluffy? The whole thing is sweet and tasty and overall pleasing to the palette?

By Jove, I think we've got it!

Third-Time's-The-Charm Muffins
(Adapted from an old Betty Crocker Cookbook)
1 large egg
1/2 cup milk (I used 1%, but whatever's in your fridge should be fine)
1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips (or blueberries, or add-in of your choice)

Whisk together egg, milk and oil. Pile on remaining ingredients, and fold/stir gently until very nearly combined. A slightly chunky batter with a touch of visible flour is much better than a tough muffin.

Divide evenly among 8 greased muffin cups. Bake in 350 degree oven for 19-20 minutes. Remove from pan ASAP to prevent over-browning and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Enjoy!

These muffins were so, so good, and part of why I'm so excited about them is now that I've got a basic, simple muffin recipe under my belt, I can start playing and tinkering with it and maybe come up with something new and exciting! I'm thinking apple streusel muffins, lemon cranberry muffins, berry blast muffins - but I better save those for another post.

Definitely give these a go, friends. I know I'll be making them again.

A side note (because I haven't blabbered on nearly enough yet) I went on a small shopping spree at Home Outfitter's today, because a very thoughtful someone gave me a gift card! Well, they gave it to me and my husband, so I could only spend half of it on new baking pans and accessories... But the point is I am super full of ideas for new treats to make and I can't wait to share it all with you guys! You can expect about 1 post per week for the coming month. Next time: probably a birthday cake for a very special lady.

Until then!

- Tamara